Exhibition: Berlin urban architecture in the 1980s. – Culture

Finding Berlin ugly – not just too crude, too hip or too sloppily managed, but in many places simply optically unappealing – is neither difficult nor particularly original, but rather a topos. It can be bent over and over again to an appreciation of the hardship, fallow land and fire walls, to an aesthetic made of Ätsch and nonetheless. But unbroken enthusiastic comments about the city have always been rare, despite the many well-known builders here or precisely because of it. Because they often had the most to complain about, if only for professional reasons. And when they had added another layer to the city with their improvements or radical cures, which was immediately perceived as the new height of desolation, that at least rehabilitated the previous ones a little. This phenomenon can also be observed elsewhere, but naturally nowhere as densely and as well as in the capital of dialectics.

The Berlinische Galerie has repeatedly looked at these cycles of damnation and reappropriation. And that is beneficial because ugliness in this case not only expresses a subjective sense of taste, but also expresses socio-political moods. At the moment, for example, many people find lavish video intercoms, glass exterior elevators and glued-on sheet metal balconies to be ugly in the sense of hateful, and not because these things often spoil a house stylistically rather than upgrade it, but because they primarily serve to increase rents or how some also say: the tenant displacement. The so-called old building charm, which realtors like to whisper about in their exposés after the successful clean-up of annoying contaminated sites, has usually also disappeared, whitewashed and windowed with plastic. But maybe it helps to remember that these old Berlin neighborhoods, which are currently driving the real estate market into delirium, were already considered cynical horror shortly after they were built, the facades of Kurfürstendamm as barbaric kitsch and even many Grunewald villas as tasteless cream cakes. The “stone Berlin”, which those responsible for planning had made their motto after the fall of the Berlin Wall, was originally born as a swear word, and the new housing estates with green spaces, which were later perceived as inhospitable, were considered a beautiful and practical alternative. When the Berlinische Galerie made late modern building its theme a few years ago, it was not entirely by chance that a mood was encountered in which the large housing estates in West and East Berlin, which had already been half-vilified to death, suddenly became topical again because of the poor rent stood there in a much milder light.

Often you can see what was meant on the models better than out there

So far, so halfway clear, this back and forth, but what do we do now with the buildings of so-called postmodernism in West and East Berlin, this big, clanking both-and-also? With “Anything Goes? Berlin Architectures of the 1980s”, the deserving house in Kreuzberg has taken on a topic that is still noticeably undigested in the stomach of this city. On the one hand, not so long ago, on the other hand, it has often not aged really well now. Much has already been torn down, and yet it is still difficult to really warm up to it.

It’s nice if someone shows you right at the beginning how you can be changed. There is a film by Harun Farocki from 1981, in which he explains over images of war-torn Berlin that for a long time the new was automatically also the beautiful, while the old was the ugly, the bad, the authoritarian. Stucco and flourishes were, so to speak, like shackles and thumbs. He was certainly speaking for many who were young in the post-war decades. But this moral-aesthetic simplicism was shaken from the sixties.

Suddenly the Munich photographer Elisabeth Niggemeyer is in the picture, who played the more important part than her co-author Wolf-Jobst Siedler in the legendary book “The Murdered City: Abgesang auf Putte und Straße, Platz und Baum”. Because if need be, he could still be dismissed as a notorious conservative. Niggemeyer’s photos, however, had a more irrefutable evidence in their juxtaposition of urban liveliness in the old neighborhoods and frosty through traffic between repulsive new building lines. Especially since she explains in the film that she is less concerned with the putti on the facade than with the possibility of a mixed urban life behind it. Even later you can see in the film Janos Frecot, the then head of the photo collection of the Berlinische Galerie, how he tries to reconstruct rows of houses with historical photos, which at that time were carelessly torn away, while in Kreuzberg the squatters fought against a deforestation, which included Platz should create for a motorway branch up to the zoo. In the meantime, it is unfortunately necessary to remind you again and again that it was mainly left to left-wing radical forces who had made it their business to preserve the old against a felt from politics and the construction industry. A view that is no longer so dialectically informed is more likely to push everything restorative to the right in a simplistic way.

What is now interesting in the context of such an exhibition is less the success of that part of the International Building Exhibition of 1987, which became an undeniable success as the “Altbau-IBA”, namely the restoration of entire blocks of houses in Kreuzberg, reflected in two similar model projects in East -Berlin’s old quarters of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. What is more amazing in this exhibition are the many original models of the other part, the so-called new IBA. Because these houses were supposed to tie in with the typologies and morphologies (both indispensable vocabulary back then, without the code words typology and morphology there was probably no table in the Paris Bar for an architect at that time), but with the means and materials of the present. And with the budget constraints of social housing. Hence concrete tubes as pillars, sheet metal ivy as a structuring ornament and simple punched squares instead of the often particularly leptosomal windows in old Berlin buildings. Often it is easier to see what was intended and meant in the models than out there, where these buildings with their streaks of rain are often a bit weeping in the streets today.

The models of everything that did not materialize were also sensational. Daniel Libeskind’s one hundred meter board cut diagonally into the ground, the “city edge”. It might still be very exciting today, for example as an entrance to the Gleisdreieckspark. Or what Hans Hollein once planned for the Kulturforum: Columns and “City Kloster” and “Bibelturm”, a kind of postmodern Rome, but with all its Armani-like shoulder padding, probably much cheaper than the emphatically simple 500 million barn, the Herzog and now build deMeuron there. And of course Aldo Rossi’s model for the German Historical Museum in the Tiergarten: a huge rear-end collision between a temple, a factory, a cathedral and a Christmas market. West Berlin has sometimes been lucky with the fall of the Berlin Wall, which then prevented some things from happening.

In practice, postmodernism often turned out to be astonishingly cramped, stubborn and impractical

Was it more of a misfortune that the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to the plans for East Berlin along Friedrichstrasse? The money wasn’t really enough beforehand, however. But in any case it’s wonderful to see here in a row how it should have turned out in the end. Where today, for example, the Berlin editorial office of the SZ sits in a decidedly linear office building from the post-reunification period, quite a spectacle was planned. If that had been done, this text could have been created here in a crazy Versailles from panel components. The large Friedrichstrasse model from the GDR building administration is ultimately the central exhibit of this exhibition. But basically everything in this exhibition that has to do with the eastern part of the city, the “capital of the GDR”, as it says on a map in the self-assured sans serif letters of the modern age, is actually spectacular in the literal sense of the word. Directly below it is already in fine squiggles: “Reconstruction of historical buildings around the Nikolaikirche”. Because the courageous turn in the historical politics of the late GDR, the enthusiastic reaching into the Prussian heritage, the bringing home of the old Fritz and the reconstruction of the old core of Berlin are indeed often described in the specialist literature, but not so often shown in exhibitions .

Open detailed view

Finally, there is also the built and subtly formulated resistance to it. The protest against postmodernism, which soon began to be abbreviated as Pomo, and the vehement defense of the late rehabilitated Bauhaus modernism, especially among GDR experts, also based on socio-political impulses. The postmodern promise of alleged freedom of choice and its attack on any idea of ​​objectivity left Marxists feeling queasy early on, even in the West. In practice, it often turned out to be astonishingly narrow, stubborn and impractical. In the broadest sense, this story also includes the fact that the catalog could actually be very readable if the texts weren’t for starlets lying around everywhere like tinny decorative pompons in the facades of many “multi-family villas” of that time. The knowledge of experts such as Wolfgang Kil or Florian Urban can be found in their respective books on the subject in a more broadly prepared and typographically unbumbled manner. But if you want to know something about the longings and the tragedy behind a lot of things that may seem ugly today while walking through Berlin in the future, please hurry up and take a look at this while it is still going on.

“Anything goes? Berlin Architectures of the 1980s”. Until August 16 in the Berlinische Galerie, daily except Tuesday 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. Info: berlinischegalerie.de